Trust me, this is the digital year! In just a short period, the selling industry has experienced panoramic change. The universal feature of these changes has been the need to engage customers and sales teams in virtual selling.

Experts agree that these conditions are not an interruption, but rather an introduction. Virtual selling is rapidly becoming a normal approach to business. Let’s put some light on virtual selling being the new normal and talk about some reasons to enable the sales team to sell virtually in 2020. Here are some key reasons why virtual selling is the new normal:

1. Access to the global market

2. Quickly Aligns to the customer’s changing needs

3. Enables an agile approach

4. Accelerates trust-building

Due to the following key trends in the B2B industry, the reactions have been quick and accelerating. 

1. Buyers prefer self-guided digital research before talking to sales

2. B2B Products are being commoditized

3. Once in-touch, buyers expect more engagement from sales (but not necessarily more phone conversations)

Appropriately designed and supplied, virtual selling channels can improve the coverage, control, and cost-effectiveness of your commercial model while offering buyers the speed of response and experiences they demand. Let’s look at this from different perspectives.

1. A commercial perspective
   Organizations can double customer engagement, productivity, and speed at the lowest cost by enabling the sales team to sell virtually with 6 major capabilities:

   1. Transparent information
      Gaining distinctness into sales activity is an ultimatum with remote selling for the simple reason that, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure what you can’t see.’
      Remote selling requires proactive communication and a straight flow of information across sales and services. For virtual means being effective, you must find ways to inform the entire selling team with rapid, transparent, and comprehensive information about all client activity and engagement.

   2. Virtual Infrastructure
      Strategically, sales leaders must properly stock their virtual representatives with elementary infrastructure, merged communications, network access hardware, collaboration, and sales enablement tools that they will need to run virtual selling effectively. A virtual infrastructure can also dramatically expand sales coverage beyond the traditional bounds of geography, territory, and functional constraints.

   3. Channel ready content
      Virtual sales representatives will need to become quicker and better at searching and advising “channel ready” content that meets buyers’ high belief for applicability, personalization, visualization, and collaboration in a remote setting situation. To meet the needs of modern buyers, virtual salespeople will need to depend more on digital communication channels, video, and collaboration platforms to deliver in minutes or hours what traditional sellers often take days or weeks to deliver. 

2. Technical Perspective
   From a technology perspective, the constraint to adapt to this new buying reality will advance the adoption of managing but extremely under-utilized technologies that offer the prospective to multiply seller performance. These include algorithmic selling, sales enablement, 5G communications, DTC channels, and even intensified reality.

   1. Sales automation
      Any organization can influence sales by accelerating technology by first freeing up Facetime, then ensuring a more dependable chain of customer engagement and activity information, and finally realizing the full capabilities of the sales technology stockpile. Strategically, by automating the planning of content selection and CRM reporting tasks, representatives can free up to 10-30% of sales time for engaging customers. Sales automation and acceleration can multiply the returns on selling existing assets.

   2. Algorithm drives sales
      Advanced analytics and sales artificial intelligence can better allocate seller time and maximize seller effectiveness. It can be done by qualifying chances based on the buyer’s aim, prioritizing accounts, advising the right content, and actions with the best chance of success. Organizations think that sales artificial intelligence involves very complex, dynamic, and advanced applications like real-time language analysis. However, in reality, the sales of artificial intelligence don’t have to be advanced to be impressive in the short term. There’s a wide continuity of applications of artificial intelligence in the selling model ranging from relatively simple to very complex. Evaluating customer sentiments, purpose, and building trust in the absence of non-verbal cues and body language is another way artificial intelligence can enhance virtual channel impact.

   3. Engagement metrics
      As per Steve Lucas, the CEO of iCIMs, ‘The most effective way to measure seller performance is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence to all the stakeholders on the revenue teams.’
      It is feasible with accessible sales technology, for salespeople to formulate measurements and motives based on customer engagement and seller activity data that give quantitative measures of account health, opportunity quality, prospective buyer, and seller performance. Measuring operations and engagement make practical sense for managers who cannot meet salespeople face to face. 

Training Sales Team

You no longer have the advantage of meeting face to face. Perhaps, when the time was right.you took those options for granted in building relationships and trust. The way you prepare for, engaging, and follow up on customers changes completely during virtual selling. Learning to sell virtually requires a noticeable switch from traditional selling skills for efficient engaging and buying experiences. Clients don’t engage in the same way and are more easily distracted during virtual selling. You need to train your sales team and prepare them for working virtually. You can check our blog, “Help your salespeople to connect with their decision-makers virtually” to know more about skills you need to teach your sales team.

B2B lead generation agencies like FunnL have an experienced, accessible remote work setup and incorporate the latest digital technologies to keep up your business continuity offers the best platform for outsourcing the inside sale campaigns. Click to know about ‘benefits of outsourcing insider sales’. We have all the experience and skills that are needed to work virtually. With an experience of generating 10,000+ sales qualified meetings virtually, FunnL provides you with an all-in-one Inside Sales Platform that permits you to design, manage, measure, and optimize your inside sales campaigns sitting at home.